Challenge Mode Gold Guides

Challenge Modes are a great new addition to the game, I've spent a huge amount of time in them since MoP launched, but I've also noticed that a lot of people give up easily because the initial brick wall to figuring them out can be daunting. I want more people to enjoy and discuss these modes! They're a lot of fun

To that end, I've put together walkthroughs for all of the current dungeons so that groups starting a dungeon can have a reference to start with and adapt the strategy to their group, reducing some of the frustration and initial hurdle of learning what you can and cannot skip, which trash is hard, etc.

Some basic tips that hold true for all challenge modes before you start:

Trash packs:
These represent a lot of the tank damage you will take during Challenge Modes, because you can't afford to CC most of the time and you often have to pull multiple packs together. The way you best handle these are by coordinating large tank cooldowns, smaller tank cooldowns, large healer cooldowns, and soft CC (interrupts, stuns, disorients, etc). For example, with my group a pretty standard 'hard' trash pull would involve a shadowfury on the pull, while I start a remorseless winter, leading to an extended stun while the DPS is AEing hard, then if there are casters that need priority interrupts we will have one person on each (or multiple on one as the situation warrants) and interrupt them while AE'ing the trash. If not enough is dead when stuns wear out, the tank will pop a big cooldown like Icebound Fortitude, or a healer cooldown like Tree of Life. Every party has a different composition, this is going to be the most challenging part to figure out. Once you know what you can do to keep a group mostly controlled for 30 seconds at a time, you will be much more successful in Challenge Modes.

Bosses:
Typically bosses are not a huge hurdle in Challenge Modes, trash represents bursts of intense difficulty, while bosses test your ability to sustain high dps and mechanical aptitude for longer periods of time. Bosses are typically where you will want to use cooldowns like Doomguards and Bloodlust/Heroism, but in some instances trash packs are good places for these as well.

Healers should be drinking before you pull any trash pack or a boss, mana is a huge issue and spending 2 seconds getting out of combat can save you from wiping when your healer goes OOM at the last 10% of a fight.

I won't make any claims that these are the most efficient routes, but I know there are a lot of random videos and it can be hard to sort through to find good information on a few of the zones, so these all are at least a great jumping off point on your quest for Gold times, and maybe you'll start to think of your own tricks and take world first

Intentional. I think you'd lose a bit of strategy (they come at a high price as they prevent DPS potions from being used for 10 minutes) if you removed them, but I also regret that there is such a high price to competing for the best times in terms of consumables.

I think the most pressing issue with challenge modes are that they don't reset cooldowns like boss encounters or arenas do. This is so easy to get around but it's extremely inconvenient to join arena matches to clear CDs or to sit around waiting for 8 minutes because of doomguards and invis pots and such.

Also, there is definitely some packs of mobs that they intended us to have to clear normally, as they *did* have stealth detection. The hardest trash pack in all of the challenge modes, in my opinion, is the one from Scarlet Monastery after the first boss. They had stealth detection.

Likely culprits would be a pet or something aggroing mobs. Pets seem to be nasty with it, guardian type mobs if they die before invis ends tend to be fine (for example, if a bloodworm or my ghoul are alive, I'll see +combat and then eventually -combat when they die). Also if you take any damage they break or use any ability - for instance you need to use Stampeding Roar PRIOR to using the potions, literally anything will break it. We always group up, count to 3, hit roar, and then pot.

I even tried going in alone with the invisibility potion. When I use it, the enemies will disappear. But when I start going to them, they just pop up and see me. Is there a positioning requirement for the potion to work? Or does it only work on the 18 sec inv potion (I used the 15 sec potion one).

To the OP, thank you for the videos. I just have Brewery, Scholo and Scarlet Monastery left and I will be checking out your guides in detail. Challenge Modes are definitely the best thing to happen to the game in a long time. I'm having a blast (of course it comes with a lot of frustration too!) I'm just a bit surprised you listed Scholomance as one of the easier dungeons. Our group assumed it was the hardest and saved it for the last.

As a healer, I'd like to add that it's extremely important to know all your mana saving tools in and out. I almost never drink during a run and I'm often in situations where I cannot use mana pots as I'd need to use an invis potion later. Healers should try to overheal as little as possible. Every cast counts.

Edit: Another thing I'd like to point out is that Combat / Self Rezzes can be extremely useful in certain situations. We had our Warlock soulstone himself and pull the trash pack before Taran Zhu in Shado-pan, clearing a path for the rest to run in and engage the boss. He resurrected and joined the fight almost immediately after. Once the boss went down, he ran back into that same trash pack with some cooldown (I forget the name) and could purify the last defender alone. He died after the CD ran out of course, but it didn't matter at that point. It's probably a good practice to take inventory of all spells available to your group before you start. Many hurdles can be solved with a little creativity.

To the OP, thank you for the videos. I just have Brewery, Scholo and Scarlet Monastery left and I will be checking out your guides in detail. Challenge Modes are definitely the best thing to happen to the game in a long time. I'm having a blast (of course it comes with a lot of frustration too!) I'm just a bit surprised you listed Scholomance as one of the easier dungeons. Our group assumed it was the hardest and saved it for the last.

As a healer, I'd like to add that it's extremely important to know all your mana saving tools in and out. I almost never drink during a run and I'm often in situations where I cannot use mana pots as I'd need to use an invis potion later. Healers should try to overheal as little as possible. Every cast counts.

Edit: Another thing I'd like to point out is that Combat / Self Rezzes can be extremely useful in certain situations. We had our Warlock soulstone himself and pull the trash pack before Taran Zhu in Shado-pan, clearing a path for the rest to run in and engage the boss. He resurrected and joined the fight almost immediately after. Once the boss went down, he ran back into that same trash pack with some cooldown (I forget the name) and could purify the last defender alone. He died after the CD ran out of course, but it didn't matter at that point. It's probably a good practice to take inventory of all spells available to your group before you start. Many hurdles can be solved with a little creativity.

Very creative And yes, absolutely. I don't expect people to be able to watch our video and do every zone exactly the same - if you have the exact same comp maybe. But it should show which pulls are good which aren't, and get your own creative juices flowing and start thinking of ways to use your composition to your advantage rather than against you. We just did Scholomance with a melee only comp today and it was completely different which sections were hard and which weren't, it was a lot of fun to rethink all of our strats